tsubakikira

So you say you want to write an OC, but don't know where to begin?  Well, here are a few tips to help you get started, and maybe help you avoid the terrible Mary Sue Trap that so many writers fall into. 1.  Create a profile for your OC, with their name, age, gender, height, weight, and other such defining characteristics, to help you flesh out how they will look.  Once you do this, go back and take out any Mary Sue/Gary Stu adjectives, such as "Sapphire Blue Hair with Icy Pink Streaks" or "Emerald Green Eyes with Amber Sparkles".  Everyone wants their character to be special, or easily recognizable, but this tends to backfire horribly when i

How to Make a Villain. Okay, keep in mind that everyone has their own way of going through characters, and villains especially are very much your own thing. You're going to have your favorite class, most likely, and you're often going to stick to it. (And sorry folks, this is an ACTUAL tutorial - there are enough joke ones out there already, funny as they may be.) One thing to generally keep in mind, however, is the tragic past - avoid it. Seriously, people, nobody likes it when the villain gets whiny. Which isn't to say that they can't have a tragic past, but it's very easy to send it into whininess, or cliché. A bad boy villain chara

How Not to Write Bad Fanfiction A collection of pet peeves and lessons learned the hard way. There's a lot of bad fanfiction out there. Everybody knows it. But that doesn't mean that fanfiction is inherently bad. I've written my share of fanfics. I've written horrid Mary Sues, left good ideas unplotted until they snowballed and avalanched away into terribleness, and forgotten plots entirely and so had to abandon fics. In writing them, I've learned a lot. I've grown as . storyteller. I've learned how to plot, how to portray characters consistenly, and I've improved in my basic language skills. So now, I'm going to record those lessons here s

Fancharacters. We're all familiar with them. Most of us greatly dislike the majority of them. This is because a large number of them are written by people creating their first characters, who really have no clue how to create an original character in the first place, and don't realize that inserting a new character into an existing work actually requires more attention to balance to be successful, never mind the fact that the authors often have fictional crushes on at least one character in the work they are writing about. For this reason, some of the most frighteningly bad Mary-Sues are often found in fanfiction. This can be avoided. Some f